A Prairie Girl's Childhood

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Hazel Litzgus, “Hitching a Ride,” 2015

watercolour on paper, 23” x 15”

Sometimes, when the cares of the world become too heavy, I retreat to bed with a cup of tea and a book from my childhood. There’s something soothing about pulling a quilt up to my chin and sculling back through The Wind in the Willows or Swallows and Amazons. 

The homey watercolour paintings of Alberta artist Hazel Litzgus hit that same spot. With their scenes of country life in the 1930s, her naïve style, with its disordered perspective and simplified forms, could be Alberta’s answer to Maritimes folk artist Maud Lewis.

Her show at the Collectors’ Gallery in Calgary, on view until Nov. 12, includes scenes of children hitching a ride in a horse-drawn cart and a solitary hunter in the fields at dawn. They make me yearn for narrative, much like William Kurelek’s paintings about his Prairie childhood. 

So it was a pleasure to discover that Litzgus writes a short memoir for each painting. A self-taught artist born on a farm near Lloydminster, Alta., she is now 92, living independently in a Calgary apartment, and painting “maybe not every day, but I try.” 

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Hazel Litzgus, “The Still,” no date

watercolour on paper, 15” x 23”

The Still, for instance, shows wintry brush piles in a farmer’s field. But all is not quite as it seems, for a little puff of smoke emerges suspiciously from one pile.

Her story relates how farmers would make hooch, sometimes selling the homebrew to neighbours. They would hide their stills from “the law” in what could become an elaborate game of hide and seek.

“One of our neighbours was extremely diligent about clearing new land for planting,” she writes. “The wigwam-shaped piles of brush dotted his field on the main road, and if from time to time one of the brush piles was emitting smoke, well, Nick was just getting rid of the wood so he could plow.

“How the police caught on, I do not know, maybe the strong smell of the boiling mash on the air gave it all away, or maybe greed made the farmer careless. But one day all was exposed and there, hidden in plain sight, was a very efficient liquor operation. The police smashed the still and the entrepreneur was taken into town to face the magistrate. It probably ended badly.”

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Hazel Litzgus, “The Coyote Hunter,” no date

watercolour on paper, 15” x 23”

In 1974, her work was included in A People’s Art, a book about Canadian folk artists by J. Russell Harper, a former curator at the National Gallery of Canada. Litzgus published her own book of paintings and stories, Where the Meadowlark Sang: Cherished Scenes from an Artist’s Childhood, in 2003. More recently, her art toured communities around Alberta in a show organized by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Litzgus started drawing and painting as a child, with the encouragement of her mother, a former schoolteacher. After high school, she worked in the advertising department of Eaton’s, then married and started a family of her own.

She hopes her paintings help people realize what life used to be like on the Prairies.

“People just made do with what they had,” she says. “There was little or no cash coming in. There was an absolute shortage of cash. We pretty much fed ourselves, sold the odd steer for cash … we were very independent. 

“It was a hard, hard life for my parents, I think, especially for my mother … But there were a lot of pleasures in our life. We had a good time. We had good neighbours. We helped each other. There were many heart-warming things about the life we had.” ■

Hazel Litzgus: New Work is on view at the Collectors’ Gallery in Calgary from Oct. 19 to Nov. 12, 2019.

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